Living Labor: Marxism and Performance Studies

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LIVING LABOR MARXISM AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES

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APRIL 9 & 10, 2014 DEPARTMENT OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES NEW YORK UNIVERSITY 721 BROADWAY, 6th FLOOR New York City CURATED BY JOSHUA LUBIN-LEVY AND ALIZA SHVARTS

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COCKTAILS WITH JACK featuring Ela Troyano, Uzi Parnes, Agosto Machado and Kembra Pfahler, hosted by Joshua Lubin-Levy

WEDNESDAY APRIL 9, 2014 721 BROADWAY / 6th FLOOR, 7PM “I think a pretty good role would be Christ. But that is too much related to the Dracula thing anyway… maybe it would be too repetitious of Dracula. But anyway the world could use a new idea - a new Christ image, and it would be fun to sort of work that out.” –– Jack Smith, 1967

In an interview with Gerard Melanga, the artist Jack Smith imagines himself arising as a Christ-like figure, or at least waking up in world where he had the opportunity to sort of work that out. Borrowing its title from a film by Uzi Parnes, Cocktails with Jack brings together Ela Troyano, Uzi Parnes, Agosto Machado and Kembra Pfahler, four artists who, to varying degrees, crossed paths with the queer underworld luminary Jack Smith. The evening will be centered around the film document Midnight At The Plaster Foundation* (ca. 1975), and punctuated by rarely seen recordings, ephemera and Smithian reenactments. In a conversation facilitated by host Joshua Lubin-Levy, our four panelists will reflect on building, and building a life within, the abundance of New York’s underworld. Uzi Parnes is a New York based filmmaker, photographer and actor who spent many years working with Jack Smith. Ela Troyano is an interdisciplinary filmmaker, born in Cuba and based in NYC. Her first film,The Bubble People (1983), features Jack Smith. Agosto Machado is a legendary downtown performer who has worked with, Ethyl Eichelberger, the Hot Peaches, the Cockettes, The Angels of Light, and Jack Smith, among others. Kembra Pfahler is an artist and rock musician, best known as the lead singer of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. Her art and music follows the philosophy of availabism—making the best of what’s available. *Courtesy of Jack Smith Archive and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels 2


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The Miner’s Object, courtesy of Melanie Gilligan

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“THE SPIRIT IS MAKING THEM MEAT”

featuring artists Melanie Gilligan and Alexander Fleming, hosted by Aliza Shvarts THURSDAY APRIL 10, 2014 721 BROADWAY / 6th FLOOR, 7PM “The spirit is making them meat” is an evening of screening and dialogue between artists Melanie Gilligan and Alexander Fleming exploring the intersections of capital, the body and gender. The evening will be focused around a screening of all five episodes of Gilligan’s film Popular Unrest, a science fiction drama which projects a strange future from our present moment of biopolitics, ‘big data’ and monetization of the social. Facilitated by host Aliza Shvarts, this dialog and screening will focus both on Gilligan’s process of making Popular Unrest as well as a more expansive consideration of Gilligan and Fleming’s dialog together and apart over the past several years, and the way in which performance and art might differently inhabit our late capitalist moment. Melanie Gilligan is an artist and writer based in New York and London. Her work spans a variety of media, and is currently focused on making narrative and non-narrative video and performance works that examine the present moment of capital as it reshapes subjects and the social. Alexander Fleming is a visual artist living in NYC. For the past 2 years, he has been core organizer at Cage, a queer anarcho-feminist space for dialogue, production, and mutual support on the Lower East Side of New York. Fleming’s practice is based around catalyzing situations. To watch Popular Unrest please visit popularunrest.org.

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LIVING LABOR MARXISM AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES

KEYNOTE ADDRESSES BY PROFESSORS

FRED MOTEN & SIANNE NGAI APRIL 11 - 13, 2014 DEPARTMENT OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES NEW YORK UNIVERSITY 721 BROADWAY, 6th FLOOR New York City ORGANIZED BY JOSHUA LUBIN-LEVY AND ALIZA SHVARTS

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CAPITAL IS DEAD LABOR, WHICH, VAMPIRE-LIKE, LIVES ONLY BY SUCKING LIVING LABOR, AND LIVES THE MORE, THE MORE LABOR IT SUCKS. —KARL MARX CAPITAL, VOL. 1

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o live and to labor are the twinned imperatives to which we are always already given. Together, they animate a rhythm of material production and reproduction across time. Marxism and performance studies both offer ways of thinking through the imbrication of life and labor. On one hand, Marxist theory historically attends to the capture and distribution of life: to the maintenance and reproduction of labor power, as well as to the processes of commodification and consumption that produce value for capital. On the other hand, performance studies is a field in which questions of life and labor are central, surfacing in discourses of force, liveness, endurance, iterability, and the everyday: it is concerned with not only what things mean, but what they do. By bringing Marxist and performance theory together, this conference asks how thinking about life and labor between these two bodies of literature can help us attend to the world at hand. How does performance analysis bring together the living body and the working body? How do Marxist and Marxist-inspired philosophies articulate and reimagine labor, value, and revolutionary struggle, particularly in relation to the social, aesthetic and political dimensions of performance and performativity? Marxism, in its many iterations, offers a methodology of thinking about materiality, temporality, and movement that revivifies an enduring question in performance studies: What can a body do? This question not only makes explicit the convergence between Marxist and performance theory, but also makes central critical traditions of black, feminist, and queer Marxism in which relationships between life, labor, and capitalism have never been incidental. The material experience and historical condition of race, gender, and sexuality is, in this sense, the premise that animates our Marxist considerations of what it means to live, labor, and perform.

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To live labor is to negotiate the extended processes of reproducing ourselves and others. To live labor is to engage the material conditions that traverse personhood and thinghood. To live labor is to attend to the forces, resonances, and energies that intertwine in the affects and objects of everyday life. Over the course of three days, and alongside two ante-conference events, Living Labor: Marxism and Performance Studies will present work that explores the intersections of performance studies and Marxist philosophies.

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SIANNE NGAI “VISCERAL ABSTRACTIONS” FRIDAY APRIL, 11 5:00 PM – 7:00PM

SIANNE NGAI is a Professor of English at Stanford University. Her

books are Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, winner of the 2012 James Russell Lowell Prize, and Ugly Feelings. Selections from both books have been translated into Swedish, Italian, German, and Slovenian. Ngai will be teaching at the Cornell School for Criticism and Theory this coming summer, and in 2014-2015 will be a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin, Germany. She is working on a new project called Theory of the Gimmick, on gimmicks and the intersection of technique and enchantment in the literature and culture of twentieth and twenty-first century capitalism.

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FRED MOTEN “COLLECTIVE HEAD” SATURDAY APRIL, 12 5:00 PM – 7:00PM

FRED MOTEN is a student of Afro-diasporic social and cultural life with

teaching, research and creative interests in poetry, performance studies, visual art and critical theory. His books include In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Hughson’s Tavern, B. Jenkins, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (with Stefano Harney), and The Feel Trio. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

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FRIDAY APRIL 11 TRACES (10:00AM – 11:45AM)

Hannah Frank (University of Chicago) Anthony Yooshin Kim (University of California, San Diego) Iván A. Ramos (University of California, Berkeley) Nick Bazzano (New York University)

ANIMATE THINGS (10:00AM – 11:45AM)

Li Cornfeld (McGill University) Ksenia Sidorenko (Yale University) Joshua Simon (MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam; Goldsmiths College)

GIRLS (12:00PM – 1:45PM)

Kara Jesella (New York University) Heather Warren-Crow (Texas Tech University) Maryn Wilkinson (University of Amsterdam)

CAPITALISM & THE OCCULT (12:00PM – 1:45PM) David J. Kim (New York University) Macklin Kowal Jackie Orr (Syracuse University)

MAKING WORKERS (3:00 – 4:45PM)

Todd Landon Barnes (Ramapo College of New Jersey) Julian Gill-Peterson (Rutgers University) Patrick McKelvey (Brown University)

WORK SPACE (3:00 – 4:45PM)

Liz Kinnamon (University of Arizona) Vivian L. Huang (New York University) Lorraine Plourde (SUNY Purchase)

KEYNOTE (5:00 PM – 7:00PM) “VISCERAL ABSTRACTIONS” Sianne Ngai (Stanford University) 12


SATURDAY APRIL 12 BETWEEN LIVING AND DEAD LABOR (10:00AM – 11:45AM)

Richard Gilman-Opalsky (University of Illinois, Springfield) Todd Hoffman (Georgia Regents University) Stevphen Shukaitis (University of Essex / Autonomedia) McKenzie Wark (The New School for Social Research)

THE LANGUAGE OF NON-RELATION (10:00AM –11:45AM)

Daniel Benjamin (University of California, Berkeley) Theodora Danylevich (The George Washington University) Tanzeen Rashed Doha (University of California, Davis) Ethan Philbrick (New York University)

FACE/MOUTH/BODY (12:00PM – 1:45PM)

Chelsey Faloona (The George Washington University) Kristin Moriah (The Graduate Center, CUNY) Elizabeth Stinson & Maya Winfrey (New York University) Rizvana Bradley (Emory University)

MEN (12:00PM – 1:45PM)

Timothy M. Griffiths (The Graduate Center, CUNY) Harmony Jankowski (Indiana University) Emily Hella Tsaconas (New York University)

ABSTRACTION & EXCESS (3:00PM – 4:45PM)

Adrienne Edwards (New York University) Patrik Haggren and Mikhail Lylov Laura Harris (University of California, Riverside) Soyoung Yoon (The New School)

ART & THE MARKETPLACE (3:00PM – 4:45PM)

Samara Davis (New York University) Steve Lyons (Concordia University) Jimena Ortuzar (University of Toronto) Lauren van Haaften-Schick (Independent Curator)

KEYNOTE (5:00 PM – 7:00PM) “COLLECTIVE HEAD” Fred Moten (UC, Riverside) 13


SUNDAY APRIL 13

HOSTILE SYSTEMS (10:00AM – 11:45AM) Anna Watkins Fisher (Cornell University) Leon Hilton (New York University) Alex Pittman (New York University)

PROPRIETARY RELATIONS (10:00AM – 11:45AM)

Martin Scherzinger (New York University) Katherine Brewer Ball (Wesleyan University) Joe Conway (University of Alabama in Huntsville)

ART/WORK (12:00 PM - 2:30 PM)

Juliana Huxtable Park McArthur Alan Ruiz Hong-Kai Wang & Nova Benway Constantina Zavitsanos moderated by Soyoung Yoon

BEYOND MARXISM AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES (3:00PM - 5:00 PM)

Anne Boyer (Kansas City Art Institute) Angela Mitropoulos (University of Sydney) Joshua Chambers-Letson (Northwestern University) Patricia Clough (The Graduate Center, CUNY) Barbara Browning (New York University) Ann Pellegrini (New York University)

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Sunflower student movement, Taipei, Taiwan. March 23, 2014. Photo: Chen You-Wei

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TRACES

10:00AM – 11:45AM

The Traces of Their Hands: Women’s Work at American Animation Studios, 1928-1961 Hannah Frank (University of Chicago) This paper offers an aesthetic history of midcentury American animated cartoons that foregrounds the work of anonymous female employees at the major studios. Just as one might study a building a single brick at a time in order to find the imprints of the laborers responsible for its construction, I examine animated cartoons frame-by-frame. I argue that moments when famous cartoon characters are distorted beyond all recognition reanimate the act of inking and painting. By attending to the tiniest of details, such as the seemingly superfluous flourish of a hand, I demonstrate how the formal properties of animated cartoons have been shaped by the means of production. “Do they hold as much mystery for you as they do for me?”: JeanPierre Gorin’s My Crasy Life, Documentary Improvisations, and the Cartographies of Empire Anthony Yooshin Kim (University of California, San Diego) This paper discuses the unlikely lines of aesthetic force and affinity that can be gleaned through an investigation of Jean-Pierre Gorin’s visual documentary remix, My Crasy Life (1992). As an inventive assemblage of fact, fiction, science fiction, and ethnography, Gorin burrows into the everyday lives of a Samoan street gang in Long Beach, California, offering a creative record of social (dis)locations shaped by imperialism and migration, racism and poverty, while playing off the persistent pathologies that plague his subjects: from Margaret Mead’s biological determinations of Samoan culture in the 1920s to the mass media’s criminalization of youth of color in the 1980s. There are no answers here. Neither Gorin nor his subjects will provide those. What we have instead are a series of detours that point to spatial, temporal, and visual (com)motions of search for the experiential possibilities that emerge within the very limits of cinema itself.

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FRIDAY

Frozen History: Sound, Ice, and Mexican Marxisms Iván A. Ramos (University of California, Berkeley) This paper explores the relationship between Marxism, performance, and history through the work of Mexico City-based artist Iván Abreu. I analyze a series of sound art pieces in which he molds an ice record that plays the original sound, usually nationalist Mexican music. I argue that M(R.P.M.) stages an encounter between the archival and the ephemeral to develop a critical Marxist analysis of Latin American history that eschews nationalism, belonging, and even the human subject. By turning to the piece’s self annihilation as it melts and disappears, I address the materiality of historical struggle even as it vanishes.

▣世界から解放され▣ or, “To be freed from the world”: Vaporwave and the Sonic-Affective Glitching of Real Subsumption Nick Bazzano (New York University) This paper implements a close listening of ▣世界から解放され▣, (“To be freed from the world”), a “vaporwave” album by ░▒▓新しいデラックスライ フ▓▒░ (“New Deluxe Life”). By glitching the sonic substrate for capital’s affective manipulation of living labor power, this album instantiates a resistant re-tooling of capital’s insidious sonic-affective entrainment tactics. ░▒▓新しいデラックスライフ▓▒░ performs in a resistant mode that takes seriously glitch’s potential to sonic-affectively create a fleeting, virtual space-time in which the outside of capital might be rendered audible and feelable from within.

RESPONDENT: ANDRÉ LEPECKI (New York University) 19


ANIMATE THINGS 10:00AM – 11:45AM

Theater of Circulation: Marxist Fembots in Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress Li Cornfeld (McGill University) Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress, part trade show and part history pageant, features a cast of audio-animatronic actors who celebrate the automation of domestic labor. Originally created in 1964, the production showcases an American family’s adaptation to domestic technologies throughout the twentieth century. Trumpeting industrial labor-saving devices for use in the home, Disney pushed against midcentury assumptions that industrialization took place outside the domestic sphere. This paper examines how, in the Carousel of Progress, Marxist feminist critique of patriarchy and capital as jointly reliant on unwaged domestic labor received a decades-long rehearsal by Walt Disney robots. Replica Res Publica: A Theoretical Consideration of Japanese Replica Food Ksenia Sidorenko (Yale University) This paper traces a theory of action centered around the relationship between humans and material objects in an attempt to analyze the contemporary phenomenon of Japanese replica food. It brings together Heidegger’s understanding of the “thing” as a gathering of persons and of the world, his concept of dwelling, and Hannah Arendt’s examination of the relationship between labor, work, and action in The Human Condition. It also considers Paolo Virno’s writing on affective labor in the post-Fordist economy, where he updates the Arendtian categories in order to theorize the potential for action in late capitalist society, and links it to Bruno Latour’s concept of the res publica, or parliament of objects, which he offers as a possible mode for considering public matters in an object-oriented democracy.

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Neomaterialism: the dialect of matter and dialectical materialism Joshua Simon (MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam; Goldsmiths College) Since the so-called dematerialization of currencies and art practices in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we have witnessed a move into what can  be called an economy of neomaterialism, in which symbols now behave like materials. With this, several shifts have occurred: the commodity has become the historical subject and our role to absorb surpluses. Under this regime, the focus of labor has shifted from production to consumption (with debt, and not only alienation, describing our existence in the world). With the subjugation of an overqualified generation to the neofeudal order of debt finance, subjectivity and materiality change.

RESPONDENT: BARBARA BROWNING (New York University) 21


GIRLS

12:00PM – 1:45PM

“The Best Use of My Time has been My Time Online”: Feminists Wasting Time on the Internet Kara Jesella (New York University) Forget what the Internet scolds say; feminist Tumblr users readily embrace the ethic of Ida Lehtonen’s sculpture The Best Use of My Time has been My Time Online. Challenging capitalism has long been a feminist project and feminists on the Internet do so by both talking about and performing a refusal to engage in conventionally productive work. In this paper, I want to talk about the politics of amateurism, time-wasting, and anti-mastery that circulates in the feminist Tumblrsphere, where the erotics of the Internet lures young feminists to spend hours and hours online—not exactly working, not exactly playing, but playing with the idea of doing both. Reaction Videos and Vocational Aesthetics Heather Warren-Crow (Texas Tech University) The believability of the screams, gasps, gagging sounds, and laughs in YouTube reaction videos allegedly proves the authenticity of the viewer-listener’s reaction. These audible, supposedly uncontrolled responses are also immaterial labor driving the attention economy. My presentation will explore the voice as a key but critically neglected aspect of labor under regimes of mediation, bringing the field of sound studies to bear on performance studies. Through an investigation of the reaction video phenomenon, I will also offer a theory of what I call vocational aesthetics.

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FRIDAY

The Performance of Leisure/Crime-as-Labour in “Spring Breakers”and “The Bling Ring” Maryn Wilkinson (University of Amsterdam) This paper explores the areas of interaction between performance and labour in recent popular films Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2012) and The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola, 2013). These films revolve around the ‘performance’ of a new form of labour: leisure/crime, where criminal acts become fruitful extensions of leisure activity and provide their middle-class actors with access to goods/money/value. The paper then asks why it is essential that the perpetrators of these leisure/crimes are teenage girls. Defined by their perennial ‘becoming’, they destabilize categorization in valuable ways. Lastly, it examines the seemingly ‘shallow’ aesthetics of these films, in order to fully reveal the resistance and critique they offer.

RESPONDENT: KANDICE CHUH (The Graduate Center, CUNY) 23




CAPITALISM & THE OCCULT 12:00PM – 1:45PM

Divine Scripts: Negotiating Desire, Uncertainty, and Risk in Contemporary South Korean Horoscopic Divination David J. Kim (New York University) Divination in this day and age is more than ever an interactive mechanism to make sense of the world, for both its practitioners and clients. Each reading is a field of production and consumption that is intersected by uncanny forces—social, economic, and political. This presentation will look at how uncertainty and risk are mediated by systems of divination in South Korea. How patrons of divination consume knowledge of their fate via horoscopes will also be examined in detail—including those who prefer more atomized settings such as the internet, where the diviners are hidden from view, or even non-existent. Crises of Containment, Conflicts of Embodiment: Leakage as Metaphor and Political Problematic Macklin Kowal Leakage - a word that presumes an analogousness between the disclosure of covert information and the secretion of matter from a body or vessel is articulated in much of contemporary discourse as a crisis of containment, one that challenges the ethics of privatization central to neoliberalism. The present paper interweaves environmental, political, and aesthetic critiques of this metaphor, positing its manifold sites as spaces of encounter between conflicting theses for the body: the discrete and the porous, the contained and the overflowing. Its critical point of departure is a 2010 performance by artist Jorge De Hoyos entitled Leakage Study a durational work that demands its performers to support a state of perpetual bodily secretion that is neither forced nor restrained.

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FRIDAY

Magical (sub)Realism and BP’s Macondo: Enchanting Catastrophe Jackie Orr (Syracuse University) Drawing on the occult theory recently conjured by Eugene Thacker, who tracks the nonhuman thought reverberating in the supernatural agencies of oil, mud, and slime, this performative paper re-imagines the “BP oil spill” as an enchanting catastrophe—unfolding across implicate orders of colonial phantasm, and new ‘subsea infrastructures’ of surplus value and the real subsumption of planetary time. Remembering the early 20th century deployment of spiritualist technologies (divining rods, witching sticks) to locate oil deposits in the ‘Americas,’ the paper situates transnational corporate petro-geology today in a haunted genealogy of sorcery and supernatural materialisms. The presentation vibrates intimately with Pignarre and Stengers’ Capitalist Sorcery in hopes of re-channeling the magical/ material force of petro-capitalism’s spellbinding hold.

RESPONDENT: AMALLE DUBLON (Duke University) 27


MAKING WORKERS 3:00PM – 4:45PM

The White Christian Shakespeare Complex, or Why Neoliberal Redemption Dramas are an Emotional Drain Todd Landon Barnes (Ramapo College of New Jersey) This talk examines what Teju Cole named the “White Christian Savior Complex” and how this complex has been institutionalized in the US Shakespeare industry, particularly in the “Shakespeare in American Communities” program, a private-public partnership between the NEA, Boeing, the Department of Defense, PBS, and state-run public schools. I survey a series of NEA-sponsored films, each of which addresses and depicts working class youth who are “redeemed” by, and indebted to, a Shakespearean paternity that has been delivered to them through market-based performance pedagogies. These neoliberal pedagogies drain emotional labor from students—by literally draining them of their tears—while interpellating them into the ideological drama of the White Christian Shakespeare Complex. The Value of the Future: The Child Entrepreneur and the Simulation of Labor Julian Gill-Peterson (Rutgers University) This presentation maps through documentary film and new media the historical mutation of the child’s relation to labor from industrial to contemporary post-Fordist and financialized forms of capital accumulation. As the fantasy of sheltered childhood crumbles in the twenty-first century, a rapprochement of children and labor is reorganizing childhood as futures trading. Looking at the child entrepreneur, a figure whose precocious affective style demonstrates adult-like enthusiasm for entrepreneurship of the self, this paper examines how the risk of financial capitalism must be downloaded from the state onto laboring children in order for there to be a future at all.

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FRIDAY

Putting Disability to Work: Performance and Entrepreneurial Self-Making Under Neoliberalism Patrick McKelvey (Brown University) This paper examines the (anti)theatrical production of the disabled entrepreneur, focusing on Putting Creativity to Work, a collaboration between the Social Security Administration and VSA arts. This manual mobilizes the theatrical actor as the laborer whom the disabled worker should emulate in her quest to become an entrepreneur while it also perpetuates assumptions regarding the mimetic incapacities of people with disabilities. In its promotion of disabled artists as model neoliberal subjects, Putting Creativity to Work exacerbates fantasies of actors as flexible, autonomous laborers even as it denies people with disabilities the theatrical capacity to act.  

RESPONDENT: RANDY MARTIN (New York University) 29


WORK SPACE 3:00PM – 4:45PM

The Attentive Turn: ‘Torquing the Erotics of Attention’ in Critical and Capital Discourse Liz Kinnamon (University of Arizona) While contemporary affective laborers attempt to replenish emotional resources and fragmented capacities for focus by mining the repertoire on self-help, psychic self-care – and specifically attention span management – reproduces labor power. And as the attention span of the affective laborer has taken center stage, critical theorists have increasingly employed the language of perception and attunement, often urging readers to synchronize or simply “pay attention.” This essay will focus on two strains of what I am calling the attentive turn: the integration of “mindfulness” into corporate business ethos and critical theorists’ use of attention rhetoric from the 1950s onward. Modern, Modular, Model Minority Vivian L. Huang (New York University) What interventions might be made in critical ethnic studies to consider the figure of the model minority as a primary figure of labor? This paper considers two discourses from the 1960s engaged with in the cross-disciplinary art practice of Mika Tajima: the model minority thesis of productive and nonthreatening Asian Americans and modern industrial design that created the cubicle pieces produced by the Herman Miller Research Corporation. Huang argues that Tajima’s use of Herman Miller Action Office Furniture playfully enacts a critical mode of slacking to consider the possibility for the laboring Asian body to perform otherwise.

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FRIDAY

Banal Sounds: Muzak, Affect, and Consumption in Postindustrial Japan Lorraine Plourde (SUNY Purchase) The ubiquitous and unremarkable presence of Muzak in commercial spaces has come to signify, as Jonathan Sterne notes, the height of banality. This paper examines the emergence of Muzak in contemporary Japan, a country where background music is heightened to a spectacular degree in public space. Muzak is simultaneously ignored, reviled, ironically appreciated, and, more recently, used to heal, calm, and regulate office workers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tokyo with Muzak employees, store workers, and consumers, this paper examines the source of Muzak’s affective power to regulate atmosphere and mood in recessionary Japan.  

RESPONDENT: KAREN SHIMAKAWA (New York University) 31


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BETWEEN LIVING AND DEAD LABOR 10:00AM - 11:45AM

Capitalist Disembodiment of Labor and Life: New Expropriations of Brains from Bodies Richard Gilman-Opalsky (University of Illinois, Springfield) Capitalism has brought about a peculiar revival of Cartesian dualism at precisely the time when cognitive science has supposedly hammered the final nails into the coffin of the disembodied mind. The eight-hour workday has been replaced by the maximal-length workday-of-the-wakeful-state. From the perspective of capital, the body is an impediment best left behind. This disembodiment defines dangerous developments in education, work, and social life. Meanwhile, bodies occupy parks and buildings, bodies block traffic, and brain activity depends on the living body. We explore how new expropriations of brains from bodies intersect with the politics of labor and life. The New Realism: Seeking Alternatives to Postmodern Pessimism Todd Hoffman (Georgia Regents University) There has been a resurgence in recent years of philosophical realism, in part due to the influence of Deleuze ad Guattari’s ontology of immanence. Manuel DeLanda has interpreted Deleuze and Guattari as constructing a flat ontology that has significant ramifications on social theory—particularly in its insistence on moving past dialectics or essentialism in any form and moving toward theories of emergence, multiplicity and ontologies of scale. Recently, Mark Fisher has also employed the notion of a capitalist realism but as a way of describing a psychological orientation to an intractable and seemingly inevitable contemporary capitalist hegemony. This paper will explore the utility of these new appeals to realism vis-a-vis Marxist thought and consider the significance of their different realist orientations.

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SATURDAY

Workers’ Inquiry, Class Composition, and Living Labor Today Stevphen Shukaitis (University of Essex / Autonomedia) Workers’ inquiry is an approach to and practice of knowledge production that seeks to understand the changing composition of labor and its potential for revolutionary social transformation. Workers’ inquiry seeks to map the continuing imposition of the class relation, not as a disinterested investigation, but rather to deepen and intensify social and political antagonisms. This presentation will seek to rethink workers’ inquiry as a practice and perspective. In particular it will explore the mutations of workers’ inquiry as it has moved from investigations carried out within an industrial-Fordist context to practices investigating cultural and performative labor.

Constructed Situations McKenzie Wark (The New School) “Live without dead time!” is a difficult injunction to live up to – even for the Situationist International. In this paper I want to briefly touch on one version of what the SI proposed as the route to living without dead time – the constructed situation. The concept of the situation has its roots in Sartre. For Sartre it was an intermediate concept, between the freedom of consciousness and the necessity of existence. The situation had a certain undecidable quality, as that zone where one could not know in advance what the parameters of freedom might be, other than through action. The situationists took the situation out of Sartre’s dualist framework, and made it not the context for action but the very thing to be consciously constructed.

RESPONDENT: DOUG HENWOOD 37


THE LANGUAGE OF NON-RELATION 10:00AM - 11:45AM

“This Is How We Dead Men Write To Each Other”: Queer Translation as Utopian Necrophilia in Jack Spicer’s After Lorca Daniel Benjamin (University of California, Berkeley) What kind of queer futurity is “dead men writ[ing] to each other”? This paper considers Jack Spicer’s move from queer alienation to queer community in After Lorca (1956). Spicer claimed to reject the negative alienation of “one night stands” (single poems) in favor of utopian serial forms that “echo and reecho against each other.” I argue that this utopian promise of queer futurity might require the carrying over of alienation. The rejected “one night stands” become the resource Spicer works through by means of translation that promises unbounded community while carrying over the untranslatable history of homophobia and alienation. The carrying over is a spectral conjuration, a necrophiliac engagement with queer poetic forebears. That Window Where Death Becomes Persistent Surplus: [Sic] Social Performance and Spectral Agency Theodora Danylevich (The George Washington University) Narratives of passing which end in death actualize a persistent social critique akin to the ethical work of the graphemic marker “[sic],” reproducing and calling attention to a flaw in the original. In the cases of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905), and William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932), defenestration or movement through windows—rhetorically and formally associated with the cinematic screen—adds a valence of the persistent and reproducible image of and within popular culture. Death allows the subject into continued life as a critically laboring specter: the perpetually reproducible image of the system’s f/law.

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SATURDAY

Dying with the World Tanzeen Rashed Doha (University of California, Davis) The contemporary moment appears starkly economic in its demeanor, but it has produced explicit political consequences for Islamist bodies. I use two recent massacres—one of madrassa students and Islamic protesters in Dhaka, Bangladesh on May 6, 2013 and the other of largely Muslim Brotherhood supporters who participated in a sit-in protesting the military coup in Cairo, Egypt on August 14, 2013—to examine how secular power inflicts pain and distributes death on practicing bodies of political-religion, and how the desecration of the flesh of Muslims is predicated upon a structure of dishonor.

Dis-associative Associations Ethan Philbrick (New York University) To think the dis-associative is to experiment with the blockages and drives to gather and form ensembles that resist the dominant relational logics and demands within the late capitalist present. Dis-association is to associate in negativity and join together in separation. It is to get dissociative— to get multiple, to lose touch, to sever—while still associating otherwise. This piece develops a sense of the dis-associative by turning to the work of Theodor Adorno, José Muñoz, and the paradigmatically dissociative performance artist Dynasty Handbag. To write the dis-associative is also to elaborate and put pressure on left relational figures such as the undercommons, the multitude, and the punk commons.

RESPONDENT: ANDREW PARKER (RUTGERS) 39


FACE/MOUTH/BODY 12:00PM - 1:45PM

“They Wasn’t Satisfied Unless I Picked the Cotton Myself:” Black Faciality and Public Reterritorializations in Kanye West’s “New Slaves” Chelsey Faloona (The George Washington University) On May 18, 2013, Kanye West premiered his “New Slaves” music video projected on sixty-six buildings across the globe, simultaneously. In Chicago, West’s hometown, West’s insurgent performance on the surfaces of city structures pointed to the structural racism reified in the gentrified cityscape. I will argue that West, through his performance of living labor, offers unique, theoretical insights. First, West plays with the temporalities of value-extraction, complicating the periodization of black immiseration; second, a Marxist psychoanalytic reading of this performance helps to integrate methods that focus either on black corporeality or black discourse by pushing faciality to the fore. Dark Star of the Evening: Sissieretta Jones’s Cultural Capital Kristin Moriah (The Graduate Center, CUNY) How did 19th century African American performers confront capitalism and manipulate their status as cultural commodities? I approach questions about the cultural labor market and performance by examining African American print culture with an awareness of sound. I ground this study in an examination of Sissieretta Jones’s performance reviews and their use as a form cultural capital. Described by some musicologists as America’s first black superstar, classically trained opera singer Sissieretta Jones toured Europe from February until November in 1895. In an attempt to influence how audiences related to her, Sissieretta Jones manipulated her foreign performance notices as a means of increasing critical attention and listening among audiences in the United States.

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Pulses from the Multitude: Virtuosity and Black Feminist Discourse Elizabeth Stinson & Maya Winfrey (New York University) Engaging the work of Paolo Virno, this conversation between two authors examines forms of protest enacted by the spectator who acts through new media. Rather than a political success or failure, the Paris 1968 student protesters exemplify the work-without-end-product of individuation. We will look at contemporary examples of protest around the murders of Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride, and Jordan Davis and around Beyoncé’s “visual album,” particularly the immaterial labor to shift the value of images by black feminists and the call for responses from white feminists to contribute to the counter-images of racialized capital formations.

Trying the Tongue: Catalysis, Adrian Piper’s Very Public/Private Rizvana Bradley (Emory University) This paper concerns the performances by Adrian Piper called the Catalysis series. In 1971, Piper stuffed a towel into her mouth and then rode the subway in New York City, taking note of her interactions with people on the train. Asking how Piper’s specific performances potentially reshape debates about labor, affect and intention, this paper approaches Catalysis IV by way of an analysis of the mouth, the flesh, and the limits of (non) sovereign knowledge. The mouth and its mechanics of enunciation are inextricably bound up with vernacular life, and a visceral poetics animated by the tongue, which ties together the specific material and erotic trajectories of a black tradition whose aesthetic labor has centered on both the affective and material production of blackness.

RESPONDENT: TAVIA NYONG’O (New York University) 41


MEN

12:00PM - 1:45PM

“Fuck You, Park Service!” Timothy Treadwell and Rugged Individualist Performativity Timothy M. Griffiths (The Graduate Center, CUNY) In the 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog cuts and narrates the collected footage of Timothy Treadwell – an amateur naturalist, documentarian, and grizzly bear enthusiast – to weave a cautionary tale about the perils of crossing the human/animal divide. In this essay, I look at the wild and queer performances of Grizzly Man from a different perspective than Herzog’s marxist one, allowing for the possibility that the performative of the “rugged male individual” traverses an easy pathology of patriarchal narcissism. In addition, I attempt to site Treadwell in a genealogy of other queer naturalists such as Thoreau. Ted Shawn’s Labor Symphony: The Aestheticized Work of Producing Masculinity Harmony Jankowski (Indiana University) All-male modern dance company Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers began performing Labor Symphony in 1934. Shawn, like many of his contemporaries, believed factory work diminished bodies’ vitality, and sought to remedy this through modern dance practices. The bodies developed through Shawn’s training methods and performances, I argue, simultaneously invoke and challenge traditional notions of masculinity by privileging strength, muscle development, and virility through physical modalities associated primarily with women during this historical moment. While the piece depicts stylized versions of field, forest, sea, and factory labor, it complicates the idea of male productivity by producing neither more nor less than its own performance and the bodies trained to create it.

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SATURDAY

Capacity Disintegration: Building a Body in Heather Cassils’s Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture Emily Hella Tsaconas (New York University) This paper delivers a reading of Heather Cassils’s 2010 performance piece Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture, in which the artist/athlete spent twenty-three weeks building a body to its maximum capacity. Positioned alongside a host of increasingly-ubiquitous athletic technologies that aim to allow ordinary and elite athletes to function beyond their “normal performance range,” my reading of Cassils’s project investigates the means by which the techniques of quantification generated under the capitalist paradigm of performance enhancement alter epistemologies of the body. Theorizing Marx alongside contemporary queer and feminist Marxist scholarship that gestures towards understandings of somatic stratification—and the resulting identity formations—as systems for the distribution of bodily capacity, this paper asks: What is capacity, really? How is it cultivated, and what is it good for?

RESPONDENT: ANN PELLEGRINI (New York University) 43


ART & THE MARKETPLACE 3:00PM – 4:45PM

“If you give me your time, I’ll give you experience”: The Marina Abramovic Institute (MAI) and the Value Theory of Labor Samara Davis (New York University) As reported by her website, Marina Abramovic’s idea to build the MAI came to her during The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, when the artist sensed the public’s need for durational work. After a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised $600,000 the institute is still shy of its $20 million goal and has yet to be completed for public use. Based on the MAI website and promotional video, in addition to the MoMA exhibition and retrospective that spawned its conception, I want to think about the MAI—while it is in formation—as an idea reflecting a complex web of contemporary values related to art and labor practices. Field Notes from an Ethnography of Manhattan Marxism Steve Lyons (Concordia University) How is Marxism performed in the New York art world’s independent platforms for exhibition, pedagogy, and debate, and how are the particular contours of the Left – in its most abstract construction – drawn through such performances? Is there such a thing as Manhattan Marxism, and if so, how and when does it appear? Composed of three texts describing events held in New York this Fall – one at White Columns, two at e-flux – this paper offers a fragmentary and non-totalizing response to the questions above while proposing that such an inquiry can be approached through a kind of quasi-ethnographic fieldwork.

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Live Matter, Hidden Labor: Rethinking the Silent Presence of the Other in Contemporary Art Jimena Ortuzar (University of Toronto) Examining the ways in which the relation between bodies, value and labor intersects with language in the work of Santiago Sierra, I reconsider the artist’s infamous method of remuneration, asking how the laboring body is discursively performed as a site of biopolitical otherness. Taking into account that the subjects of Sierra’s work are simultaneously outside the art world and inside the art market by virtue of their cheap labor, I consider how these workers move from a position of invisibility to one of hypervisibility, and furthermore, how this process might bring value to those bodies that have none. Siegelaub’s Agreement as Critical Circulation Lauren van Haaften-Schick (Independent Curator) Conceptual art and institutional critique proposed that the discourses of labor and law may be utilized to further artists’ rights and develop critical forms of dissemination. At the crux of this economic and legal history is Seth Siegelaub and lawyer Robert Projansky’s “Artists’ Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement,” which attached resale, reproduction, and exhibition terms to artworks. As such, the contract enabled artists to claim economic and legal agency by reproducing the logic of social and legal institutions. Both practical and performative, Siegelaub’s Agreement appropriated the force of law in order to create a new mode of artistic agency.

RESPONDENT: SADIA SHIRAZI (Cornell University) 45


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ABSTRACTION & EXCESS 3:00PM – 4:45PM

Just Enough Night: Notes on Blackness in Abstraction Adrienne Edwards (New York University) The paper pursues the vexing question: what is blackness in abstraction? Its aim is to analyze how is it possible to ascertain blackness when legibility is foreclosed. The particularity of black abstraction is explicated in a three-fold manner: the aesthetics of the maximal; the historical paradigm of representation, which informs its conceptual aspects; and the sense or affective range of black abstraction, as informed by various thinkers, ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Gilles Deleuze. Black abstraction, as a mode and technique, is explored through the works of Ellen Gallagher, Glenn Ligon, Jennie C. Jones, Adam Pendleton, Rashid Johnson, and Steve McQueen. Real Abstract Movement - Grace and Totality in the Light Cycles of Lillian and Frank Gilbreth Patrik Haggren and Mikhail Lylov Capital’s indifferent subsumption of particular labors, which makes the concept of work generally applicable, a basic human activity, ironically exchanges properties and disperses agency among animate “beings” and inanimate “things”. Scientific managers Lillian and Frank Gilbreth claimed that their photographic studies of “motion itself” could eliminate superfluous action while communicating experience through indicators of absolute space-time. For ideally efficient motions, or “pure light cycles,” however, they argued a gracefulness of its own measure that cancelled the need for imposing perspective, direction or pace, making these “total” movements irreproducible as such. Movement visualized as lines of light blended the subject and object contours of labor activity, suggesting a differentiation immanent to production as real abstraction.

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The Volatility of Ferment: Investigations into Living Labor by Karl Marx and Gordon Matta-Clark Laura Harris (University of California, Riverside) In The Grundrisse, Karl Marx describes the difference between living labor and its lifeless products as a matter of grammatical tense. Tense marks the activity of living labor, which he will render, in Capital, through the metaphor of “ferment.” I will look at the way Marx writes about ferment and the way artist Gordon Matta-Clark extends this metaphor in the literally explosive experiments he undertook, using agar and other substances, between 1969 and 1971, arguing that the volatility of these experiments results from the contact between the living and the lifeless, contact whose effects could not be fully anticipated or controlled. “An emotional accretion in 48 steps” Soyoung Yoon (The New School) Yvonne Rainer’s film A Film About a Woman Who…(1974) enacts a pseudo-clinical analysis of the disintegration of a relationship, culminating in a rupturing last step: “She had wanted to bash his fucking face in.” This paper works through select feminist performances of the 1970s in their resistance to the spectacularization of the body, of the omission of the body-at-work. I address Rainer’s method of analysis itself, the political-economic implications of affective capture/inscription, her “48 steps.” Emphasis is on processes of normalization and the shift from an immediate to a mediated violence, especially the relation between mediation and the inscription of gender—and how feminist performances have staged the excess of a body, the body-as-excess, in their resistance to the normative pressures of such inscription, in their “failure” of interpellation.

RESPONDENT: CHRISTOPHER MYERS 49


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HOSTILE SYSTEMS 10:00AM - 11:45AM

Persona Non Grata: Playing the Parasite in Inhospitable Times Anna Watkins Fisher (Cornell University) How might we leverage the constitutive hospitality of a system that overwhelmingly consigns women and minorities to a perverse and intensified patronage economy? In this talk, I’ll argue that parasitism is a performative maneuver by which digital and performance artists have sought to turn the intimate protocols of hospitality to their advantage, exploiting the infrastructural vulnerabilities of their “host domains.” By “playing” the parasite, I’ll suggest that these artists have not merely mirrored back the parasitical logic of neoliberalism itself but have performed the glitch or breach in its host system that threatens its undoing from the inside. Post-Industrial Pathology: Cognition, Disability, and the Aesthetics of Late Capitalism Leon Hilton (New York University) This paper attempts to bring together contemporary scholarly debates concerning the philosophical and ethical dimensions of cognitive disability with recent Marxist theorizations of “cognitive capitalism.” I ask how disabled and pathologized cognitive states and subjectivities have been understood to be alternately produced by, and productive for, the material and abstract configurations that create value under late capitalism. Considering the aesthetic propositions of the voluntarily institutionalized artist Yayoi Kusama and the neurodivergent poet and performance artist Christopher Knowles, I argue that performance studies offers a promising disciplinary location from which to develop a historical materialist account of disability aesthetics.

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Conscriptive Estrangement: Intermedial Thought and Liz Magic Laser’s Chase (2010) Alex Pittman (New York University) Liz Magic Laser’s video-performance Chase stages Bertolt Brecht’s play Man Equals Man in ATM vestibules around New York City. As a script, Brecht’s play plots how depersonalization functions within the economy of colonial-military conscription. However, as Laser embeds it within the bank lobby, her work troubles, as it produces theatrical and intermedial estrangement effects, how we read Brecht’s play about the colonial province within and against the street scenes of the global city. This presentation uses this work as an opening to think through the forces that conscript war, capital and character across the 20th and early 21st century.

RESPONDENT: JOHN ANDREWS (The Graduate Center, CUNY) 53


PROPRIETARY RELATIONS 10:00AM - 11:45AM

Dialectic of the Laboring Commons Martin Scherzinger (New York University) Recent scholarship in a variety of disciplines has tackled the impact of IP law on practices of politics, science, economics, law and culture. IP has been extended to new information objects (from databases and software designs to biological seed lines, bacteria, genetically engineered life forms and DNA sequences), and lengths of time for which protection is granted have been substantially extended for nearly all objects. Despite this encroachment, this paper argues against the idea that an expanding commons is inherently progressive, and notes the peculiar comingling of the commons with its privatized antithesis that productively underwrites new networks of exchange value. The Repetitions of Escape: Tony Kushner & the Abolitionist Anarchy of Henry ‘Box’ Brown Katherine Brewer Ball (Wesleyan University) What can be learned from thinking escape and escapism together? Much cultural analysis is rightfully invested in progress, resistance and revolution as the primary methods for enacting social change. This paper looks to non-pragmatic models of political and aesthetic engagement such as defection, exit, refusal and withdrawal. Reading Tony Kushner’s 2010 The Henry Box Brown Play—which stages Brown’s 1849 fugitive tale of disappearance and escape in a cargo box, and his subsequent performance in The Mirror of Slavery—I explore the relation between escape and escapism, anarchy and abolition, property and illusion. What is the performative potential of escape in this contemporary artwork? Furthermore, what forms of political engagement might it inspire?

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Monetary Fashion in the Antebellum U.S. Joe Conway (University of Alabama in Huntsville) In the nineteenth century, coins and paper currency were touted as signs of modernity, while “jewelry money” such as wampum was used as a sign of the primitive. To be civilized was to not wear your money. Georg Simmel notes that this elimination of “adornment for others” as a feature of exchange means that modern money is drained of a social character. However, by reading texts about marginal individuals negotiating the antebellum currency system alongside actual images of particular bank notes, I argue that if Americans did not exactly wear their money, their use of it amounted to a political fashion statement.

RESPONDENT: JAMIE PARRA (Columbia University) 55


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ART/WORK

12:00PM - 2:30PM Juliana Huxtable, Park McArthur, Alan Ruiz, Hong-Kai Wang & Nova Benway, and Constantina Zavitsanos moderated by Soyoung Yoon In one of his more famous passages from the Theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx writes that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” Within the humanities—and particularly the field of performance studies—the question of how to enact change in the world is often theorized through art practice. Artists and artwork have become the “objects of study” for academic scholarship, and scholarship a “diagram” for art practice, one form of cultural capital becoming another. Seeking to examine and complicate this relation, ART/ WORK brings together artists Juliana Huxtable, Park McArthur, Alan Ruiz, Hong-Kai Wang & Nova Benway, and Constantina Zavitsanos to show their work, do their work, and/or reflect on broader ideas on working and at work within the field of contemporary art and culture. Moderated by art historian Soyoung Yoon, this panel will provide an opportunity to more critically and creatively explore the idea of “living labor” through different orientations toward art, work, and praxis. Juliana Huxtable is a writer, artist and DJ based in NYC. She is a member of House of Ladosha, a queer artist collective based in Brooklyn, and creator and resident DJ of #SHOCKVALUENYC. She creates and speaks from the positions of cyborg, priestess, witch and trans girl simultaneously. She is originally from Bryan/College Station, TX and graduated from Bard College. Her writing has appeared and been referenced in Artforum, Mousse, Maker Magazine and Garmento. She has read and performed at Envoy Enterprises, Brooklyn Academy of Music and Artists space. www.julianahuxtable.tumblr.com Park McArthur was born in 1984 in North Carolina and lives and works in New York City. She attended the Whitney Independent Study Program (2010 – 2012) and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2012. McArthur’s art has been presented at The Kitchen (NYC); Galerie Lars Friedrich (Berlin); Laurel Gitlen Gallery (NYC); Essex Street (NYC), Catherine Bastide (Brussels); Sculpture Center (NYC), the ICA in Philadelphia and Botkyka Konsthall (Sweden). She has presented papers and screening at the Society for Disability Studies (Orlando), University of the Arts (London), SUNY Stonybrook, CUNY and Hunter College. Upcoming exhibitions include Yale Union (Portland) and Galerie Lars Friedrich. She is an active member of New York City’s disability community and has worked on the Caring Across Generations campaign for domestic workers rights and in-home assistive care services for people with disabilities. www.essexstreet.biz 58


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Alan Ruiz was born in Mexico City and lives and works in New York. He is interested in questioning the tensions that exist between architecture and symbolic power and how the built environment reproduces social hierarchies. He received his MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT, and a BFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. Ruiz has exhibited work at Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), the Bronx Museum of the Arts (Bronx, NY); Y Gallery (NYC); Johannes Vogt Gallery (NYC); Tape Modern (Berlin); and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Building 110 on Governors Island. He has participated in residencies with LMCC; The Art & Law Program, Fordham Law School, New York, NY; AIM, Bronx Museum; and the Yale Norfolk Summer School for Art and Music, Norfolk, CT. In 2013 he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. www.alanruiz.net Hong-Kai Wang & Nova Benway. Born in Huwei, Taiwan, Hong-Kai Wang is currently a participant of the PhD in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She works with listening as a speculative tool to explore social relations and the (re)construction of cultural memory. Nova Benway is a curator, writer and member of the organizing committee of The Public School, New York, where she hosts Between Who, a series of events exploring the intersections between pedagogy and artistic research and artists’ communities. Since 2001, she has been on the curatorial team at The Drawing Center in New York, where she recently launched Open Sessions, a two-year program of experimental exhibitions and public programs co-organized with more than fifty local, national and international artists. www.w-h-k.net, www.thepublicschool.org Constantina Zavitsanos is an artist whose practice engages the sculptural surfaces and temporalities of performance, text, projection and sound. She works with concepts of intimacy, consent, and contraction--especially as related to debt and dependency. Zavitsanos attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and has shared work at Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, with Cage at MoMA PS1, and at the Hessel Museum at Bard College. constantinazavitsanos.com Soyoung Yoon is an Assistant Professor of Art History at The New School. In addition to teaching, Yoon has also served as a curatorial advisor to the American Pavilion of the Third Guangzhou Triennial in China as well as collaborated with artists through the Whitney Independent Study Program (New York, NY), Malmö Art Academy in Lund University (Malmö, Sweden) and the School of Media Arts in the Royal Danish Art Academy of Fine Arts (Copenhagen, Denmark).

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BEYOND MARXISM AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES 3:00PM - 5:00PM

The Jeune Fille as She Really Is Anne Boyer (Kansas City Art Institute) Contractual Performance, Labor & the Art of Life Angela Mitropoulos (University of Sydney) The Impermanent Encounter: Genji Monogatari, The Knife, and the One Night Stand Joshua Chambers-Letson (Northwestern Univsersity) Working Through the Work of Numbers Patricia Clough (The Graduate Center, CUNY) Having One’s Cake and Eating It Too Barbara Browning (New York University) Response Ann Pellegrini (New York University)

A plenary session convened in honor of Professor José Esteban Muñoz, and generously sponsored by Women & Performance, a journal of feminist theory.

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Organized by Aliza Shvarts Joshua Lubin-Levy Sponsored by the Department of Performance Studies (New York University) Women & Performance, a journal of feminist theory Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality the Department of Art and Public Policy the Department of English the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication the Department of Art and Art Professions the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics Thank You José Esteban Muñoz, Karen Shimakawa, Barbara Browning, John Andrews, Kandice Chuh, Amalle Dublon, Laura Elena Fortes, Doug Henwood, Cassidy Hollinger, Jessica Holmes, André Lepecki, Duncan MacKinnon, Randy Martin, Chrisopher Myers, Tavia Nyong’o, Kelly O’Grady, Andrew Parker, Jamie Parra, Ann Pellegrini, Noel Rodriguez Jr., Sadia Shirazi, Cecilia Olusola Tribble, and Soyoung Yoon Program design by Alan Ruiz Audio/Video documentation by Caroline Key & Harold Batista Video documentation will be available at: www.womenandperformance.org

PRODUCED BY

LUMPEN: A JOURNAL OF QUEER MATERIALISM


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